Artemis crew joins CBS town hall ahead of historic moon mission

The Artemis II astronauts used a CBS town hall to bring their nine-day voyage into America’s living rooms, turning a record-setting test flight into a public case for NASA’s next Moon push. Gayle King and Tony Dokoupil moderated the special, which paired Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen with students, a 5-year-old space fan and two well-known boosters of the space program.

The hour-long broadcast, part of CBS News’ Things That Matter series, aired Friday at 7:30 a.m. ET/PT on CBS and Paramount+, with additional streaming on CBSNews.com and the CBS News YouTube channel. CBS News 24/7 was set to air the special again Saturday, May 2, at 9 p.m. ET. The format put the astronauts in front of students from NEST+m and M.S. 255 Salk School of Science in New York City, as well as 2026 NASA HUNCH finalists from Frontier Central High School in New York and Bergen County Technical School in New Jersey.

The public-facing event arrived just weeks after Artemis II completed the first crewed test flight of NASA’s Artemis program and the first crewed lunar flyby in more than 50 years. The mission lifted off from Kennedy Space Center on April 1, 2026, aboard Orion atop the Space Launch System, spent 9 days, 1 hour and 32 minutes in space, and splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off San Diego on April 10. NASA said the crew reached 248,655 miles from Earth on April 6, passing the farthest-distance human spaceflight record set by Apollo 13.

That distance mattered beyond the numbers. Artemis II was designed to test Orion’s life-support systems and the deep-space performance of the SLS rocket, a technical rehearsal for the longer, more complex missions that NASA says will return astronauts to the lunar surface and eventually push toward Mars. The town hall gave those engineering goals a human frame, with Ron Howard, director of Apollo 13, and Bill Nye, chief ambassador of The Planetary Society, joining the conversation alongside the astronauts.

For NASA, the appearance also served a broader political purpose. A Moon program that stretches across multiple missions, budgets and election cycles needs sustained public attention, and Artemis II offered a rare moment when the promise of exploration, the proof of engineering and the symbolism of American space leadership all came together in one broadcast.